ON THE RISE
“Afraid,” the latest release from Eden Hill, is the story of a spiritual journey told in hip-hop.
It is all about the trip, not the destination, and it is Christian with all the elements people want in hip-hop and rap but with no preachiness and no pretense that the decision to believe takes away all doubt and pain.
What it does have is all the pleasure of listening to an accomplished artist work out his message in beat and melody.
“Basically, ‘Afraid’ is a journey from believing falsehoods about God to knowing the truth,” said Eden, “but not walking in it, to, finally, accepting the truth and then figuring out how to walk in it.”
The flow of his rap varies with the stages of the journey, told to beats delivered by piano and drums. Main points are accented sharply by strings.
“It was a very, very fun beat to make,” he said. “It started out with the piano, for sure. The piano is more like a classical tone, and it’s kind of like a build-up throughout the whole progression.”
Turmoil and doubt kick it off:
Look I don't even know where to begin
Probably I should start looking within
And find the broken bits of me that hide discretely underneath my skin
The intensity, volume and speed of the piano and Eden’s rap build until the music suddenly stops. Into the silence, Eden says:
I feel
The drum drops on
Psychotic
And it’s off to the races.
Familiar trap and Eden’s trap deal with the same life reality. The difference is in reaction and perspective.
On the one hand is anger, bravado, defiance or violence, from the natural human perspective. On the other hand is Eden’s spiritual perspective, which trends toward hope.
Hardship and fear are present in both.
“It’s a really raw, vulnerable song that deals with a spiritual awakening and seeking healing and understanding through faith in God.”
He doesn’t shy away from the “mental turmoil” that comes through dealing with regret and shame.
The song deals with common misconceptions, like God is just there to give us what we want.”
Maybe I could get a bit of this
Maybe I could get a bit of that
Come on God I’m doing what you're asking
The music helps tell the story.
“The orchestral buildup engages the listener in the story, where all these thoughts are coming up, all these doubts and misconceptions are coming up. The music represents the train of thought behind the lyrics. Then the drums hit at the empowering moments.”
And I got it going for me lyrically I’m blessed
I’ve been picked out of the sin I had he called me elect
And you can see the transformation grace is taking effect
Eden’s Christian journey began in church before faith fell away from middle school through high school and college and a 10-year career in secular rap. That period involved witchcraft, communion with dark spirits, New Age spiritualism, “all that dark energy stuff.”
Then one night, “Jesus met me in an acid trip.” The meeting included a terrifying vision of his physical and spiritual death, and he came out of the dream with the thought, “What if Jesus really is the way, the truth and the life?”
He stopped making music after 2020 when, he says, God withdrew his gift for music “until I promised that I would make my music to glorify Him and to be honest.”
This year, he started his career all over. He has released an eight-track album, Patience, and two singles, “Trust” and now “Afraid.”
He calls himself “a pivotal figure in Christian rap,” by which he means being honest about the Christian journey.
Most Christian rappers, he said, don’t talk about struggling with faith because “they want to promote Christianity as your life gets better instantly when that’s not really the case.”
“Christianity is a hard walk. While we’re on this planet, we’re gonna struggle.”
“Being a pivotal figure in the Christian hip-hop space, I want to show people that, ‘Hey, this is it. This is a battlefield, but we have armor and we have a protector. We have angel armies on our side.’ And not only that, but there is a wonderful eternity ahead of us.”
“Afraid” introduces the 10 tracks on his next album, Fear No Evil. The album drops on October 4.
It will be “kind of like a cinematic journey about going from spiritual bondage to peace and spiritual freedom.”
Wanting or seeking a Christian message is not necessary to appreciate his music. His lyrics are not pablum. They deal with struggle, doubt and hardship. Believe in Christianity or not, the lyrics serve up food for thought and the music creates a lively, energetic space for thinking.
“The truth is, we live in a broken world. We live in a world burdened by poverty, by wars, division in politics, division in households, littered with hardships left and right, and it attacks us personally. Christian or not, we carry the burden of this world. I just want people to know that there’s hope.”
Ride the hope along with Eden Hill. Connect with him on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
Amazon Music
Apple Music
SoundCloud
Spotify
YouTube
Instagram
TikTok
ON THE RISE
Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe has spoken to NME about the band’s first new single in four years ‘Things Take Time’ and the “philosophical freedom” that has come with writing new material for the band’s long-awaited fourth studio album.
The single marks the band’s first new original material since their acclaimed 2022 album ‘Angel In Realtime.’, and marks a significant change of pace. Rather than returning to the maximalist, big-swinging indie-rock that has shaped their previous albums, ‘Things Take Time’ opts for a refined and jazzy groove that swings atop sparse piano chords and stabs of horns.
As far as comeback singles go, it’s about as subtle and discreet as possible – as if it’s entering through a side door rather than kicking the front gate open. As Le’aupepe revealed, this has very much been done by design.
‘Angel In Realtime.’ was given four stars by NME upon its 2022 release, and described as “a triumphant exploration of love and life”. It led to the biggest shows of the band’s career, including their first-ever headlining arena shows in their native Australia and selling out Brixton Academy in the UK. After a final show in support of the record at British Summer Time with Lana Del Rey, however, Gang of Youths effectively went dark – save for the late 2023 release of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ for the festive season.
“We all live quiet lives,” Le’aupepe told NME. “We don’t have our own social media, or anything like that. We’re not interested in the public stuff, and I tend to require a lot of respite from the world. Having said that, we’re all kind of ready for it again now. It’s weirdly exciting.”
Check out the full interview with Le’aupepe below, where he discussed the differences between observational and emotive songwriting, the ongoing struggle with perfectionism and why Gang of Youths continually has to die in order to be reborn again.
NME: Hello Dave. Of all the new material the band has been working on, why was ‘Things Take Time’ chosen as the first single?
David Le’aupepe: “Well, the powers that be chose it – probably because it’s the shortest one! It’s a three-minute song, which is miraculous for a band like ours. It’s also a pop song, which is a form I’ve not really dabbled in much. It was a really liberating song to write – I’ve used that word so many times in interviews in the past, but in this instance it really set me free in a sense. I’m actually singing for once, too. I’ve done a lot of talking that happens to be in tune, or these grandiose fucking yells, but I haven’t really allowed my voice to be free like this before.
“One of the things I really like about the song is that, when it was finished and we listened back to it, it felt like a proper break with the past – and we were OK with that. We’ve achieved great things in the past, and we’re proud of it, but this is the thread we’re following now musically. I was delighted by that.”
What place did the song come from in a lyrical sense?
“It’s about nothing… Well, not nothing. It’s about growing plants. My wife ordered too many tomato seeds, so she went to work growing all of these tomatoes in our house. I go over to record with Tom [Hobden, Gang of Youths’ multi-instrumentalist] at his home studio, and that overlooks his back garden. His wife Emma grows all these beautiful plants in the yard. It got me fascinated with the cycle of growth and death, and being baffled that people can grow things without killing them.
“It’s funny… I feel like death and rebirth are a constant part of our subject matter. We’re always dealing with them in one way or another, so it’s kind of weird that we almost accidentally continued it – even though the song is so different for us.”
How naturally did the musical change of pace come to you? There’s fittingly a bit of a parallel with a song like ‘Tend the Garden’, but even that feels a lot bigger and more layered in comparison to ‘Things Take Time’…
“I came in with the idea one night after dinner, and played the little riff. Recorded it, played a drum part, recorded that, got Donnie [Borzestowski, Gang of Youths’ drummer] to redo it, and voilà. You hear all of us at work on this song. When Tom heard my little ‘doo doo doo’ in the verse, it was his idea to chuck in a horn arrangement to replicate them. Donnie is a world-class drummer, and doing something a bit jazzier was right in his repertoire.
“As for Jung [Kim, Gang of Youths’ guitarist/keyboardist], he always has such a deft hand. He’s always so careful, and so organised with his thoughts. I think that’s why it was funny when I finally sent in my vocal take – after doing like 400 takes, he was just like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t really need to worry about it’. Nothing came easily, but everything just made sense.”
Everything went into radio silence after ‘Angel in Realtime.’ Was there ever a period between that cycle ending and the new one beginning where you genuinely thought Gang of Youths was over?
“Of course. That happens after every album we’ve made. I sit there at the end saying ‘I’m done’, and then enough time passes and I’m up like Leo [DiCaprio] in The Wolf of Wall Street: ‘I’m not fucking leaving!’ Out of all of the cycles, ‘Angel’ was definitely the hardest. I love that album, I really do; I think it’s my best songwriting, but it was this whole family odyssey. The arena thing was so weird, too. We’re an indie rock band – we never set out to play in stadiums, especially when you look at how scrappy we were when the band started. It was just the nature of things.
“If we came back trying to be an arena-rock band? Snoozy as fuck. We’re not in that place anymore. Those songs from ‘Angel’ are everyone else’s now. They don’t really play a role in my day-to-day life, or my inner world. What ‘Things Take Time’ represents is a philosophical freedom from having to write about personal shit. I had to break this cycle of feeling like I have to make opuses that dig into the underbelly of my life every single time. I could just write songs with their own meaning, that are curious and spiritual without having to directly cost me something.”
Was it a process of realising a song could still be reflective of you without having to be very hyper-literally about you, the way a song like ‘Brothers’ was?
“The writing now is less and less about trying to find things within myself to deal with, and more and more about things that I notice and that I contemplate. The new songs are, more often than not, about something I’ve observed rather than something I’ve felt. They’re about the external. There’s another new song we played, ‘YeYu’, and that’s probably the only really personal song out of all of them. That’s a real point of difference for a songwriter like me.”
As you just mentioned, you played your first show in three years earlier this month at a small theatre 90 minutes south of Sydney, with three new songs on the setlist – including ‘Things Take Time’. What did performing on stage again mean to you?
“Loads. It renewed something in me. There was a real warmth and affection there – you always get that with regional audiences in beautiful theatres. I knew some people who were in the front row, and who said hi afterwards. People have gotten married since they last saw us, or had kids since they last saw us. It was nice to see a lot of those familiar faces, and to see how they’re existing and how life is for them now. Hell, it was just nice to see people again. Sometimes, the boredom and the monotony of playing live and touring can wear down on even the most dedicated road dog. We all felt that at the end of the last tour, so there were some nerves in coming back to it. As soon as we stepped out on stage, though, it was like, ‘this is what it’s all about. This is the point of it all’.”
That show felt like a lot of the older material was being reinvented through the lens of the new stuff. You played ‘Magnolia’ solo on electric guitar, and ‘Let Me Down Easy’ was pared back in a really subtle way. Can we expect Gang of Youths’ shows to play out a little differently now that it’s no longer a confetti-cannon arena rock show?
“We haven’t even figured that out yet. This was our first foray into really doing it again, you know? The album that we’re working on has more of a sense of just plugging in and playing – a lot of bare elements of piano, bass, drums, vocals. We want these songs to stand out by themselves, as opposed to needing loads of backing tracks running in order for them to work. That factored into the live show – could we reinvent these songs in a way that makes sense to us? It was about striking a middle ground between giving people familiarity and us not dying of boredom.”
Is the new album done?
“Nah.”
How will you know when it’s done?
“When someone tells me it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever made! With [debut album, 2015’s] ‘The Positions’, I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew we had a deadline to turn everything in. With [second album, 2017’s] ‘Go Farther in Lightness’, I was totally sure about every aspect of that album before we turned it in. All I really know about this one, so far, is that when I got back the masters for ‘Things Take Time’, it felt like I was closer to the end of the album than I was to the beginning. I’ve always cooked the goose too long, I think, and now it’s a process of learning not to.”
‘Things Take Time’ is out now. Gang of Youths will perform at All Points East in London’s Hyde Park with Twenty One Pilots on August 30 before a run of UK and European shows in November and December. Visit here for tickets and more information.
